Cities Made of Song, 1963

Blowin' in the Wind by Peter, Paul and Mary

"How many times can a man turn his head / Pretending he just doesn't see?"

The chronological peculiarity of Doctor Who having its genesis so near the end of the year means I get to unveil the first of many digressions I mean to undertake over the course of the marathon series. Once I come to the end of a calendar year in the Who releases I cover, I'll take a step back and put a spotlight on my personal favorite song that happened to have been released during it. Music history is a bit of a fascination of mine, and one which, in indulging, I hope to emphasize the cultural atmospheres in which Doctor Who has lived (and died) over the course of its long life.

So we arrive at Blowin' in the Wind. This is a cover, of course - the release of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan", six months before the broadcast of An Unearthly Child, marks the premiere release of this song, as well as the point where its author, Bob Dylan, began his upward swing in popularity. As a further note, he was even a BBC alumnus, appearing on 13 January 1963 in the television play Madhouse on Castle Street and performing Blowin' in the Wind at its close. In perhaps a cruel reflection of Who itself, all known recordings of this performance were trashed by the BBC five years later, and only a patchy audio track exists.

Peter, Paul and Mary were really no newer on the scene than Dylan himself, so it is perhaps a testimony to the link between the artists, and their mutual admiration, that they released their own rendition of Blowin' in the Wind almost straight after his. The trio shared a manager with Dylan at the time, who happily introduced it to them for their own take. It's a pure matter of personal preference, but I'm more partial to Peter, Paul and Mary's recording, the harmonies and melodic guitar of their rendition suiting the essential gentleness of the song a little better than Dylan's rough-hewn voice. Many seemed to agree, seeing the cover version of the song jump to number two on the Billboard charts, which itself gave a significant boost to Dylan's album release. The song's proudest and most enduring moment would come with its performance on 28 August 1963 at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom - indeed, fittingly, its melody was supposedly inspired by the old African-American spiritual We Will Overcome, one of the marching anthems of the civil rights movement.

It's tempting to draw a link between the birth of this protest song and the Cuban Missile Crisis, given the specific callouts about weapons bans it gives, but that event postdates the song's original conception by several months. Perhaps it's more useful to step back and regard the general atmosphere that prevailed all throughout 1962, and which only came to an uneasy head that October, coloring the cultural scene onto which Doctor Who soon emerged. The Cold War was at its frostiest, the Kennedy administration in the United States ramping up for America's disastrous involvement in the war in Vietnam, and the lingering spectre of nuclear war still sat on the horizon. My mother was born in 1962. When Kennedy made dire warnings of a "full retaliatory response" over the situation in Cuba and she was six months old, my grandparents watched with worry as tanks rolled down the street by their house on their way to the nearby Air Force base. This was a climate of paranoia.

The lingering pangs of this fear come to the forefront a couple of times in The Daleks. The titular tinpots are a paranoid bunch themselves, and for all the fascist iconography with which they were decked, their squawking about uniformity echoes more closely Cold War anxieties about communism. Nuclear war itself hangs over the story's iconography in the neutronic war which devastated Skaro, and which the Daleks threaten to unleash again to ensure their survival. When Ian tells the Thals that "pacifism only works when everyone feels the same," the story bows to the possible eventuality that a peaceful solution to this threat cannot be entertained.

Folk anthems like Blowin' in the Wind refuse to accept that possibility, emerging defiant from one of the most terrifying times in world history to present the olive branch as something worth valuing. A bit woolly and overly optimistic though they may be, in times of terror, hope can be a revolutionary thing. The Summer of Love may be a long way off, but the winds of change are blowing - the Sixties counterculture is already budding here, when Doctor Who is just in its infancy. As it grasps for a clear idea of what it is and how it fits into the cultural world, it's worth keeping an eye on this line of questioning. How will this curious British family series adapt to the world of the 1960s, and how will it respond to this great historical moment?

"The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind / The answer is blowin' in the wind."

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 1 September 2017.)